Neglected Lectures From the Sixties and Seventies

Witchcraft & Magic as an Elective

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, & Sermons

Lesson: Witchcraft and Magic as an Elective

Genre:

Track: 26

Dictation Name: RR259A2

Location/Venue:

Year: January 23, 1961

In June of 1970, Isaac {?}, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, received a degree in Magic. This was the first degree granted in Magic in any university in the United States. It was obvious that magic had now arrived. It was obvious moreover that the interest in magic and witchcraft is more than a passing fad like the Huila hoop. University after university is now having courses in the subject. Adults who want to take extension courses can, in almost any major city, find that the universities are ready to give extension courses in magic and witchcraft. Not too many years ago, it was commonly believed that only the ignorant and the unlettered showed any interest in these subjects, but now very definitely, it is not only a subject of importance to the academic community, but increasingly it is in evidence on all sides. Indeed, instead of being a subject to be amused about, to relate only to ignorant Africans and tribal peoples of the world, it has become in some quarters, as we have seen rise of cannibalistic acts, blood ceremonies, ritual murders, and other abominations, it has become a subject of terror.

What is magic? To understand magic, it is important not to associate it with its primitive manifestation. One of the tribal witchdoctor takes and rattles some bones together and mutters some incantations, he is indulging in magic, but it is important to understand the theory, the faith, the belief behind that practice in order that we can identify it in its more sophisticated forms. Magic is that attempt to buy man, to gain control over the world, other men, and the supernatural. Magic is in every age, precisely that, a means to power, illegitimate power, the attempt by man to gain total power over the world, over other men, and over the supernatural.

Now, this is the definition that is common to anthropologists. If you check the Dictionary of Anthropology, you’ll find that this is the definition. It is, therefore, to understand this fact, because if we identify magic only with its manifestations, only with what, say, a witch doctor does, rather than grasping at this its meaning, we will not understand why it is so powerful and so appealing to the modern mind. In its developed form, therefore, magic as we meet it today, is in science, in education, and in politics, the attempt by man to gain absolute, total, god-like power over other men, over the world around him, and over whatever powers may exist in the universe. One of the first signs of magic coming into the educational curriculum was the introduction of social sciences. When some of us went to school, instead of social science, we had history, and civics and related subjects, but now social science is taught. Why social science? Social science is the study of how men can be controlled. As a result, it has superseded history and civics. The art of politics today is the art of control, the attempt to gain control. It is the reaching after power over other people. As a result, politics today progressively becomes the extension of power by the state over man.

Two or three years ago, I was in the forum in Northern California on education. It was held in a junior high school auditorium, and I was one of three speakers with Senator Clark Bradley as master of ceremonies. When the meeting was over, a teacher came charging up with blood in her eye. I was the target, and as we began to debate, she was increasingly angry with everything I had to say, and when I championed freedom as a desirable social objective, she said I was deluding people because, she said, in the modern world, freedom is obsolete. Why? Because, for her, society is an area for science, and the government of science requires that society be conducted as an experiment, everything fully controlled. Thus, to introduce freedom into it is to destroy any kind of valid scientific planning. As a result, she said, science in the modern world is obsolete.

Now, both her interpretation of science and her interpretation of government, as well as of education smacked of magic. The attempt to gain total power, the attempt to play god in the lives of men, god over nature, god over all things, but this is the essence of magic. The magician in every age aims at total power, illegitimate power, and if he does not have it, he likes to claim it and to pretend to it.

This then, is magic whether we meet it in a witch doctor, in a medicine man in an Indian tribe, and I could speak at great length of medicine men, having lived on a reservation for some years, or whether we meet it among educators and among politicians. What is the distinction then between magic and witchcraft? They are obviously closely related. They are almost like twins, but there is a difference.

Again, turning to Dr. Wineg{?} and the Dictionary of Anthropology for our definition, we find that witchcraft is that form of magic which seeks power and control over man, nature, and all powers that may exist, but seeks it from below. Magic, pure magic, is interested in power, however, it gains it. Witchcraft says, the source of that power is from below, from the powers in chaos, from the powers in primitivism, in the demonic, the satanic. Whatever is below, that is our source of power.

Hence it is that in witchcraft, cannibalism is very common a factor. A very large percentage of cannibalism all over the world has, behind it, witchcraft. A great deal of the terrorism that is common in many primitive societies, the leopard societies, for example, of Africa, has as its function, the deliberate reaching downward for power. Thus it is that in every age, when men, in the practice of magic, whether in tribal societies, in Medieval Europe, or in the modern world, have felt that their magic lacks that power which they desire. They look downward, they look below. This is the reason why with, even modern men, students at our universities, you have blood sacrifices. You have resorts to all kinds of things which look downward to chaos, to the primitive. This is why in the philosophy of revolution, the belief in salvation, the belief in the attainment of power, is from below.

One of the interesting things about Karl Marx is that he really had no program. What he had instead was a radical critique of man and society, but when it came to the answers when Lenin took power, he really had no Marxist answer because, supposedly, once the revolution took place, Utopia should arrive, and Lenin had to improvise and then to borrow extensively from an American socialist for his ideas of a Soviet form of government.

Marx believed that the very act of reaching down to the depths of society, stirring up the masses, unleashing total violence against all things would bring the cleansing and the regeneration, would bring a new order. This would be power. Lenin’s answer to almost every problem when he was alive was total terror. Read David Shub’s little book on Lenin and you see how again and again he invokes the terror.

Stalin’s answer to problems was again terror. The mentality of the revolutionist is very close to that of the witch doctor; look below for power, for your answer, and as a result, there is an exaltation of everything that is primitive and demonic. There is an exaltation of chaos.

Thus, magic and witchcraft are radically different from religion. Religion is the submission to the ultimate power of the universe, to God, and it is then the exercise of dominion under God and His law, but magic and witchcraft, instead of seeking to submit themselves to the power that be, seek to dominate all things and to establish themselves in the position of sovereignty, in the position of total power and control. Whenever man departs from a religious faith, in ever era of history, he has gravitated towards witchcraft and magic.

Rome had become a highly civilized state; cultured, advanced, literate, and it became skeptical, irreligious, and the result was immediately the welling up of a tremendous belief in magic and witchcraft, until finally the culture and civilization of Rome was eaten out from within and destroyed by this kind of belief, the same thing of course, had happened earlier in Greece. The same thing happened again in the Middle Ages, and witchcraft and magic became a tremendous delusion and a tremendous attempt by men to gain power, and then the bloody battle between those who represented magic and witchcraft, and those who represented the church.

There is, however, still another aspect of this belief that it is important for us to consider. Behind the belief in magic and witchcraft, which implies, of course, a rejection of God, it does not come into being until God is rejected, is the assumption that man is his own god, that the magician is going to play God. This is why the legend of Dr. Faustus always associates Dr. Faustus with magic. In its original form, the storm of Dr. Faustus was the story of a man who, because he wanted power, sold his soul to the Devil. Now in the story, as we meet it in its original form, magic is not in the picture, but almost immediately, magic enters into the myth, the story of Dr. Faustus in its every form, because it was recognized immediately by all that his desire for this absolute kind of power represented magic and witchcraft, and so Faustus became a name for magic and witchcraft.

Now, let us put ourselves in the mind of these people who believe that man can be his own god. The first thing we read about God as we turn to the Bible, is this: That in the beginning the Lord God created the heavens and the earth, and then it gives us the six days of creation, and each of those are introduced with the very simple words. And God said Let there be light, and there was light. And God said and it was so. God being God, absolute and sovereign, by His creative word whatever he said came to pass immediately and instantaneously. This an inescapable attribute of God. Now, in the modern age, the moment man began to assume the position of the magician, to grasp at total power, he began to claim the same power that God had, the power by his word to remake reality.

The beginning of modern philosophy was Emmanuel Kant. Now, Emmanuel Kant felt that philosophy had a tremendous problem. Was there a real world outside of man’s mind? Is this wall, this table, this platform real? Is there a given world, an established, a created world outside of man’s mind? Now, this problem seems a ridiculous one to us, but for a couple of centuries from Descartes through Kant, this was the great problem of philosophy. How did we know that man’s senses were adequately and faithfully reproducing that outside world? The answer of Kant was, it’s possible that there is something wholly other out there, but practically, realistically, the world and other people are all aspects of my experience and of my mind, so that the basic reality is my mind, not other people or the world. In other words, God doesn’t become a problem. You are god. You only exist out there in terms of this kind of philosophy because I exist. This is why Rilke, the great existentialist poet of the last century, said, What would you do, God, if I die? In other words, God doesn’t exist if I don’t exist because I am god.

Now, Frederick Hegel, the great follower of Kant, carried this to its logical conclusion, and whether you look to Karl Marx, or John Dewey, or Sartre, every philosopher on the horizon today is a child of Hegel. Hegel’s great phrase was four words: “The rational is the real.” Now this is pure magic. What does that mean? Well, the primitive witch doctor would take a little doll, and fashion it, and say, “This is John Doe and I’m going to put some pins in this, and John Doe is going to die.” Now, what Hegel said was you didn’t have to have that. The rational is the real. What I conceive of in my mind is real, nothing else is. If it is not rational, according to my logic and my thinking, it doesn’t exist. Marx, as a good pupil of Hegel, said, The philosophers until now had been content to understand the world, but now we realize that it is the duty of the philosopher to make it, to make it by revolution, to change things as they are because they are not real, and to put them together as a god and to make a new creation, a new world. The rational is the real. This is modern philosophy, and you meet it on all sides.

To give you an example, one young man who has been creating quite a stir is Jerry Rubin. This is his book, Do it. You cannot treat Jerry Rubin as an oddball and a freak, only, although he is that. He is a good product of the modern educational system, and its belief in magic because, what does he say? And this is Hegel brought down to the level of the kind of people Jerry Rubin talks to. He writes, “We create reality wherever we go by living our fantasies.” That’s Hegel. That’s magic. We create reality wherever we go by living our fantasies, and we are going to abolish all of you. Our magic makes the rational the real, and our fantasies are what are rational to us, and therefore, we are going to remake everything. We’re going to abolish the whole world of God, of law, of order, the whole world of capitalism, of the middle classes. We are going to create a totally new world by living out our fantasies because the rational is the real.

Hegel’s four words sank into the mind of Jerry Rubin, and all that he has done and all that he writes is simply the declaration of that principle, and that’s the principle behind Angela Davis. Angela Davis’s teacher, Marcuse, at San Diego, is the greatest expositor of Hegel today, and this magical perspective is precisely the perspective that Angeles Davis is teaching. The rational is the real. Man’s word it eh creative word, and in simply by declaring his word and acting out his word, man will change the world, be god over it, and abolish everything that stands in the way. This is why, therefore, magic is so important in our day. Modern man is the most devoted believed in magic that history of the world has ever seen.

The medicine man I knew and the witch doctors of Africa are mild believers in magic and witchcraft compared to your modern university professor and student, and your modern politician. You don’t need a balanced budget anymore, do you? After all, the rational is the real, isn’t it? and if you’ve decided it’s unnecessary, it’s unnecessary. Didn’t President Nixon say last night that with increased spending and increased deficits, we have ended inflation? The rational is the real. This is the belief in magic, and whatever party you belong to these days, you’re dealing with magic, politicians who believe in it. Magic has come to the fore in every age, where faith in God has receded, and has become increasingly a terrifying aspect of man’s life. It will not recede, nor can it recede until faith in the sovereign creator God is revived. Apart from that faith, the world falls into the hands of magicians. Are there any questions now? We have a few minutes left that we can give to questions. Yes?

[Audience] What about Christians who have the attitude “Let go and let God?” and he’ll take personal responsibility. They feel that God will overrule or oversee in paying their bills if they go into debt, or, doesn’t this almost degenerate to a point of believing in magic?

[Rushdoony] Yes, because under God, man is to obey Him and work out the implications of his salvation. It is not acquiescent philosophy. They feed into the hands of magicians for that position. They turn the world over to them in effect. Yes?

[Audience] Well, if God is the author of reasoning, {?}

[Rushdoony] True, but you see, for Hegel, there is no God. There is only mind, developing, evolving mind, the mind of man, the mind in history. As a result, when he says the rational is the real, he means the rationality of the autonomous mind of man. This is really the kind of thing that people get locked up for, or should be locked up for, but now it is the entrenched philosophy of the modern world. Yes?

[Audience] What do you think is the purpose of this new magazine, Man, Myth, and Magic? Are you familiar with it?

[Rushdoony] Yes, I am. It is to provide a kind of encyclopedia on the subject. Some of the articles in it are fairly good, but none of them are really from a Christian perspective. Some of them are very definitely slanted in the wrong direction. Yes?

[Audience] On the college campus, the problem{?} was with one study to get a degree in magic?

[Rushdoony] I don’t know what the curriculum is there. I do know some of the courses that are given at various schools, and extension divisions, very definitely treat magic as a serious subject, and they deal basically with this aspect of control. They may not use that identical word, but the essence at magic is man’s attempt to dominate, to control the world, to play God over it, and this is behind their thinking, so they very definitely are dealing with the same thing we are talking about under different terms. Yes?

[Audience] Care to comment {?} the present day {?} program?

[Rushdoony] Well, I’d rather deal with general theory, but I will say this. On television, we are getting more and more of a softening of people to accept magic and witchcraft as something that’s basically good. Yes?

[Audience] Mr. Rushdoony, I’m against{?} here tonight and I have some very good friends with, and I didn’t come here because I wanted to, but I want to ask you a question. I sat down here, and I wrote a list on this little placement, negative/positive. I’ve heard you say nothing but say negatives. You haven’t said a damn thing that’s good for this country or anything in the world. You talk about people . . .

[Audience] {?} do for God, didn’t he?

[Audience] For all we know, he didn’t say anything about what’s good in this country {?} something about people {?} talk about something positive {?} You’ve been negative absolutely {?}

[Audience] You’ve been repetitive {?}

[Audience] You’re positive? [laughter]

[Audience] {?} people believe in magic {?} other groups {?} people {?}

[Rushdoony] Very definitely. All these groups that further magic do associate themselves very closely with a variety of groups. There is a lot of money behind magic and witchcraft. You see more and more publishers rushing to get books out with lots of money behind them, to promote this gospel according to magic and witchcraft. Yes?

[Audience] Well, man has always wanted to be free, and realize some control of destiny and improvement, and how do you, {?}, I would like an answer. You know, Jesus was accused by the authorities of His time of practicing magic, and being a sidewalk {?}, and how do you rationalize the positive new order of Jesus and the good message and the healing, and all these things with a rigid acceptance of the authorities of his world, and matter as not a minimal to man’s design?

[Rushdoony] Well, first of all, I would not say that man has always tried to be and wanted to be free. I wish that were so, but man has usually preferred slavery. This is the tragic fact. The history of mankind has largely been a history of slavery, because this is what man wants. In fact, most of the time, man has not wanted freedom. He has regarded it as a menace. I have cited at some of my meetings the illustration of a professor who came out of his ivory tower about eight years ago to lecture to a group of students outside his field, on the decline of liberty, because he was very concerned, and he was shocked when he finished because the first question that came up was, “What’s so desirable about liberty?” IN other words, these students felt that security, socially, was far more important than liberty. Now, this is man’s basic problem. He doesn’t want freedom. It is only as he becomes a new man in Christ that he becomes a free man and wants a free society. Now, with regard to Christ, his basic mission was to regenerate man, to recreate him in Himself, and to establish him in his dominion under God, so that man, under God, could reestablish this world in that liberty, that order, that obedience to law, and that development of the potentialities of man, of society, and of the earth, which is God’s purpose for man. We are in Christ, a new creation, St. Paul says. Therefore, as citizens of that new creation, we have a duty, progressively, to make all things new, to bring all things under the dominion of Christ, and to remake all things in terms of His law word. Is there another . . . ? Yes?

[Audience] Yes, well, I understand that you can take these classes, in college in witchcraft or man and I believe then, that the philosophy behind {?} schools, but what I’m wondering is do you know of anything, any situation where something more tangible is being taught in grade school, or elementary, or high school. Do you think it’s being {?} tangible way, the philosophy behind {?} do you see what I’m saying?

[Rushdoony] Yes. It’s in the philosophy of education, it’s not, on those lower levels, in the specific subject. It’s in the philosophy, whereby the child, from early years, begins to think magically, begins to think in terms of power and control. So that today, they are drawing cartoons about nursery school children having sit-down strikes and carrying placards, “Power to the kiddies,” you see? This is humorous, but it does put its finger on this attempt by man to play God, and the idea that it is infecting children at a progressively lower rate. This is why, each year, the rebellion in education is at a lower level. We had the rioting, a few years ago, only at the university level. Then it was common on the high school level. Now, it is becoming, in evidence, in the junior high level. In other words, if man takes over the position of the magician, to have absolute power, the rational is the real for him, then he will abandon the idea that he should be under any kind of order or discipline, because he is his own God. Yes?

[Audience] I just wanted to ask you if it wasn’t this individual personal responsibility that man does not want rather than freedom, you’re thinking the freedom {?} want responsibility {?} for, {?}

[Rushdoony] Very well put. Man wants to often, freedom from responsibility rather than freedom with responsibility. You put your finger on a very essential distinction. One more question, yes?

[Audience] Do you think there was any magic involved in the Manson murders?

[Rushdoony] I don’t know enough about the Manson murders to say, but there are those who have intimated that there was a background of magic there. We do know that in the hippy movements, a great deal of magic and witchcraft is in evidence, and the symbols are quite widely used. I’ll turn the meeting back over to our master of ceremonies.

End of tape